Archives

Contact

A bank robber from Queens, New York, could have made off with $4,000 after he pulled off a successful heist, but instead he decided to head off to Dunkin’ Donuts for a coffee and wait for the police to find him.

Michael J Cassano, 38, from Oakland Gardens, robbed the Hudson City Savings Bank’s Lodi branch last Monday with a replica handgun. After leaving the premises and heading to his car that was parked nearby, he decided to amble down the street and head for a coffee and a cigarette.

Earlier this month the National Coffee Policy for Uganda received a substantial boost when The United States Agency of International Development (commonly known as USAID) provisionally set aside nearly $500,000 which could eventually be utilised to develop and rejuvenate Uganda’s coffee industry.

There are a number of steps which need to be undertaken first, but this is clearly some welcome news.

Situated on both sides of the Bosphorus and straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, Istanbul is a vibrant city that will stimulate and delight the senses in equal measures. And it has an irrevocable link to coffee.

If you so happen to be visiting Istanbul (or, lest we forget, if you live there) then you can take a meandering journey through history to explore the origins, cultural and social impact of Turkish Coffee as the Topkapi Palace Museum is hosting the coffee lover’s dream exhibition.

It’s pretty easy to make that conclusion because otherwise you wouldn’t be visiting a website that concerns itself with the covering all aspects of the global coffee industry. From market specific reports through to temper tantrums involving coffee cups, they’re all given – for better or for worse – equal weighting here.

And because that you’re here, visiting World Coffee Press, we think that we’re pretty safe in the knowledge that you’ll like recent news reports doing the rounds which are telling everybody to drink more coffee.

Speaking at a one day event centred upon the Rwandan coffee sector, George William Kayonga, the Chief Executive Officer for the National Agricultural Export Board (NAEB), announced plans for a new government back initiative that will, hopefully, improve both productivity and quality of the cash crop.

This new policy aims to redress a number of issues which has plagued the country’s coffee industry in recent years, making everything more streamlined and efficient in the process.

The phrase ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ may primarily be associated with comic books and Spider Man’s origin, but the words attributed to Benjamin Parker should also be taken on board by many a company – especially those whose business it is to serve and employ a wide range of people from vastly different cultural and social backgrounds.

Some customers of Starbucks with an Armenian background have been up in arms recently after taking offence to some newly installed interior artwork. Visible in a number of locations across the United States, a poster depicted a group of women dressed in traditional Armenian attire standing underneath a depiction of the Turkish flag. Safe to say, the reaction wasn’t positive.

“You think about Blue Bottle and Stumptown and Intelligentsia; they’re doing marvellous things around coffee. [But] we’re not perceived to be in the group [and] that’s really not fair,” said Major Cohen, a member of Starbucks’ coffee engagement team.

All we have to do is decide how we want to be in that group: We have the coffee, we have the people, we have the sites. It’s just a matter of what we want to focus our attention on.”

There may have been a dip in coffee prices last week on the ICE Futures Exchange when some fears about the Brazilian climate were alleviated, but that hasn’t stopped some people within the industry to issue new words of warning: “The world cannot afford to keep looking only at Brazil,” said Roberio Silva, the executive director of the International Coffee Organization (ICO).

Speaking earlier this month, James Cordier of the Liberty Trading Group attempted to dispel the prospect of Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producing country, suffering from successive prolonged and potentially damaging dry spells.

Congratulations are in order for over 800 Rwandan women who have recently completed a twelve-month course devoted to learning about modern and viable coffee growing practices.

The programme, run by a non-government supported entity Sustainable Harvest Rwanda, is hoping to break down gender barriers, inequalities and other roadblocks that often stand in the way of women being fully recompensed for their work.

According to reports that are doing the rounds, a new, ambitious plan has been laid out by the Kenyan government.

A senior official, speaking earlier this week, has stated that there is a movement to see the African country produce double the amount of coffee it does now, increasing output from 50,000 tonnes per annum to 100,000.